EvoTest - Evolutionary testing for complex systems

Projektdetails

Gesamtkosten:

EU-Beitrag:

Koordiniert in:

Thema(en):

Finanzierungsprogramm:

STREP - Specific Targeted Research Project

Ziel

Trends such as globalisation and shorter lifecycles place great demands on the flexibility of the software industry. In order to compete on an international scale, a decreasing time to market and an increasing level of quality are essential. However, the complexity of software systems is increasing, making quality assurance a difficult task since complex systems present unpredictable global behaviours that cannot be easily explained from the characteristics of their components.

Testing is at the moment the mostly used quality assurance technique. However, the development of cost-effective and high-quality complex systems opens challenges that cannot be faced only with traditional testing approaches. New techniques for systematisation and automation are required. Automation of difficult and time-consuming tasks like test case design seems to be the only way to master the complexity, and develop quality systems within a competitive amount of time.

EvoTest is a multidisciplinary project that combines the power of evolutionary adaptive techniques, inspired by biological evolution, with software engineering techniques like slicing, program transformation and reliability analysis in order to find solutions to the problems of testing software systems and deal with its complexity. Since evolutionary algorithms are themselves complex systems, exhibiting emergent and adaptive behaviour, they are ideally suited to the nature of the problem.

EvoTest's results will be evaluated using real case studies from the automotive, telecommunications and communication industries. This is highly significant since the next generation of automotive and telecommunications systems will support communication and negotiation between vehicles and communications devices. This will lead to complex emergent behaviour. EvoTest is highly timely in seeking to build upon the lead European science and technology in evolutionary testing and in applying this to the problems of testing complex systems.